Partner with local community groups

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You will have plenty of existing members, athletes and parents who would love to volunteer at your club. And in one of our previous blogs, Seven ways to attract and retain coaches at your grassroots club, we spoke to our community of club experts for advice on how to bring those existing stakeholders into volunteer/coaching positions. One of the recurring pieces of advice was to implement a Young Leaders programme to introduce athletes into the staffing team from an early age.


As well as introducing your own athletes into europe rcs data volunteering, offer the opportunity to a wider group of young people by working with local community groups. For example, scouts or guides groups. You could also partner with local schools and colleges, or work with Active Partnerships to identify local and national partners.

Within a lot of these groups, young people are required to gain work experience – such as those undertaking a Duke of Edinburgh award. This is therefore the perfect opportunity for your club to build a relationship with these organisations, so that they can refer their participants to you when the time comes.
Create clear job responsibilities for volunteers
Although unpaid, volunteering is still work. That means you need to ensure your volunteers have clear responsibilities, and that they know exactly what these are. If potential volunteers know from the outset what they are signing up for (i.e. how many hours they’ll be required to work each week, on which days, and what they will be doing), they are more likely to stay around.

However, if they are surprised by suddenly being required more hours than they expected, or doing jobs they didn’t sign up for, they might not stick with your club for very long.

This is an easy step that only requires a little bit of planning time. It may sound obvious, but it’s one that can be forgotten about. As James Davenport, Chair of Kirkham Junior Football Club, told us, ‘We probably have lots of willing helpers, but they need to be managed and coordinated better…. that’s a job in itself to organise.